New Humans Arise from the Collapse

Originally published in Japanese in IDEA No.390 (2020). This English version was prepared for KLEINSTEIN TEXTS from the Japanese manuscript.

The Birth of Contemporary Fashion

Vladimir Lenin, who founded the Soviet Union, is said to have once remarked, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” We are now living through day after day in which decades seem to have been compressed into a matter of weeks, due to the coronavirus pandemic that is said to have begun gradually in November 2019.

It was exactly thirty years earlier, in November 1989, that another major turning point arrived. The Berlin Wall fell, and a week later a revolution calling for the end of the communist regime broke out in Czechoslovakia. Just as Lenin’s words suggest, the events that occurred in a matter of weeks continued to set off a chain reaction, and two years later the enormous system known as the Soviet Union collapsed.¹1 Masaru Sato’s The Self-Destructing Empire (Shinchosha, 2006) vividly depicts young people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at the time.

The year beginning in 1988, when the collapse of the Soviet Union began, was also an important period for viewing contemporary fashion as a whole. In 1988, Issey Miyake began developing pleats, COMME des GARÇONS published SIX, and Wim Wenders filmed Yohji Yamamoto for Notebook on Cities and Clothes.²2 In the 1980s, major Japanese apparel companies invested in and incubated overseas designers. Marc Jacobs and Jean-Paul Gaultier launched independent brands in the first half of the 1980s with investment from Onward Kashiyama. Donna Karan also launched her brand with investment from Takihyo, led by Tomio Taki. It is thought-provoking that two of these three later came under LVMH. As an aside, 1989 was also the year Haruki Murakami published the English translation of A Wild Sheep Chase (Kodansha USA), making a serious entry into the English-speaking world. It was also a period when designers influenced by movements in Japan were becoming active. At this time, the Belgian designer Martin Margiela held his first show, while the Austrian designer Helmut Lang was attracting attention in the United States. And we should not forget that, as Paris and New York were swept up in the excitement of a new scene, Bernard Arnault was acquiring CELINE and LVMH through M&A between 1988 and 1989.

Yoso: New Clothes Make New Humans

“Clothes make the man” is also a saying attributed to Mark Twain. The reason the deconstructive approach of the DC brands that emerged in the 1980s was accepted was that those clothes were needed as a uniform for resisting subordination to the social hierarchies of the postwar world.³3 The current of contemporary art born in New York was also accepted by the market in opposition to existing upper-class hierarchies. To acquire, accept, and elevate something new that others still find difficult to recognize can itself be called a kind of fashion style for collectors. Art Dealers: The People Who Move Contemporary Art by Laura de Coppet and Alan Jones (PARCO Publishing, 1988), an oral history of players in contemporary art from the 1960s and 1970s, offers much to learn from when looking at the current flow of fashion. Fashion design born from strong individuality brought in from outside Paris moved beyond the simple framework of making new garments. Through the “attire” it presented, it came to reflect the “mode of being” of a new way of life. The development of contemporary fashion is inseparable from the birth of new people that accompanies social development. This change has taken place not only through designers, but through everyone involved in fashion: buyers, salespeople, shop owners, media, and PR, all participating in a program that creates new human beings.

If Nishi Amane, who translated Art as “geijutsu” and Philosophy as “tetsugaku,” had encountered this “fashion” that creates new humans, how would he have translated it?⁴4 Nishi Amane (1829-1897), a close aide to Tokugawa Yoshinobu who later served as a bureaucrat in the Meiji government, translated many foreign terms into Japanese. Words such as evolution, science, technology, economy, knowledge, and concept are also among his translations. Many of them are now used by Chinese speakers as well. Given that fashion concerns both a person’s “mode of being” and “attire,” perhaps fashion should be translated as “yoso,” the modality of dress. Trend is only one aspect of yoso.⁵5 In Chinese, fashion is written as shizhuang. The word fashion originally derives from the Latin factio, meaning “do” or “make.” Mode indicates a state or manner of things, “manner” or “way.” I discussed the broader view of fashion through the term yoso in “Fashion, Discretized Human and Its Modality” (ÉKRITS, 2016) and its English version “Designing Nearby, Designing In-distance” (ÉKRITS, 2020). http://ekrits.jp/en/

Macroscopic Fashion Design

Fashion design has provided uniforms that allow one individual person to exist as a multifaceted human being, or dividual.⁶6 For a vision of a new society based on the idea of the dividual, as opposed to the individual, see Ken Suzuki’s The Smooth Society and Its Enemies (Keiso Shobo, 2013). On the other hand, designers who create new fashion are expected to possess a consistent individuality. This may be an ironic situation.

In any creative act, the starting point is always the individual’s search, but for that very reason brands constantly carry the limits of identity within them. Just as the Soviet Union, created through a powerful concept, collapsed over time from its internal contradictions, maintaining a universal and consistent concept that can withstand the passage of time is not easy.

The players who have made skillful use of this contradiction are new capitalists who appeared from outside fashion, beginning with Bernard Arnault. The system in which external designers become involved in the product development and direction of historic brands, and in which branding is carried out under titles such as creative director or artistic director, gradually became common after Karl Lagerfeld’s success as designer at FENDI. Over the past decade, appointments of creative directors by LVMH and KERING have been among the most closely watched topics in fashion. The person who made this current system feel natural was the aforementioned Bernard Arnault, who entered the fashion world during its early phase in the 1980s.

At Christian Dior, which lacked momentum when Arnault acquired it, he appointed the Italian designer Gianfranco Ferre, then in 1996 selected John Galliano as his successor in response to the popularity of avant-garde design. For the group’s main brand, Louis Vuitton, he appointed Marc Jacobs, the designer of a brand he had acquired, as creative director, transforming a luggage house into a comprehensive luxury brand. In 2000, he appointed Hedi Slimane to launch the Christian Dior men’s line, which had not previously existed, creating a new current in menswear. He continued to increase the value of the maisons according to the times while reading the flow of macroeconomics and social conditions: bringing in Raf Simons to modernize Dior, appointing Kim Jones with emerging markets in view, and selecting Virgil Abloh for Louis Vuitton. The renewal of brand image through this kind of casting and investment has become an especially dominant method in recent years. If we see this movement as “the design of the phenomenon called fashion,” we may call it “macroscopic fashion design.”

Parallel Histories of Contemporary Fashion

From the 2016 United States presidential election until the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, financial markets were awash with capital, and investments were made in startups of every kind. At the extreme, the goal for many new entrepreneurs was no longer to build a large company such as Microsoft, Apple, or Google, but rather to sell the company they had started to such a corporation. This situation has not been unrelated to the fashion world of recent years. Fashion Week is no longer only a place where brands deliver new messages to consumers and the press, as it once was. For emerging fashion designers, it is also being used as a pitch venue for appealing to capitalists. What these fashion brands sell now is no longer clothing alone, but increasingly the brand itself. And what investors who practice macroscopic fashion design seek are designers who, even if short-lived, can focus on this very moment and create an image with a sense of the times.

Beyond the Pandemic

Looking back in this way, we can see that two currents exist within the thirty-year history of contemporary fashion. One is the history of fashion woven by powerful individuals, which reached a major milestone with the COMME des GARÇONS exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2017.⁷7 The COMME des GARÇONS exhibition was the second exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted to a living designer, but the 1983 Yves Saint Laurent exhibition is said to have been poorly received by art-world figures. This may have raised the barrier for active designers to hold exhibitions there. Andrew Bolton discusses this episode in the exhibition catalogue Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017), p. 23. The other is the history of macroscopic fashion design by Bernard Arnault, Francois Pinault, and others, who expanded behind the scenes by skillfully using individual fashion designers.

Contemporary fashion has always evolved by absorbing heterogeneous forms of yoso born on the margins into the ritual of Fashion Week, held twice a year in Paris, the center of European culture. Will that system change because of the pandemic? We hear voices worrying that the system will collapse, but perhaps those fears will prove unfounded. A century ago, Paul Poiret, who freed women from the corset and possessed enormous influence, faded after the Spanish flu and the First World War, while CHANEL emerged from a devastated society. The form of Fashion Week as we know it today was born from people in New York who stood up during the Second World War in place of Paris, which had lost its power under Nazi occupation. After the war, what supported that system’s development from behind was the United States, which had become a hegemonic power through the success of its capitalist economy, and its market. Systems do not simply collapse because of crises. It may be more accurate to say that they continually update themselves while giving rise to new players.⁸8 The first Fashion Week organization was born in New York in 1943 during the Second World War. At that time the United States was in the middle of the war, while Paris was under Nazi occupation. Ready-to-wear Fashion Week began in 1973. In Japan, Okinawa had just been returned in May 1972, while the United States was still mired in the Vietnam War. The 1970s were also a time when American fashion, long regarded as merely imitating Paris, began to show a global presence. Across art, music, film, and other areas of popular culture, America’s presence stood out worldwide. Yves Saint Laurent and others participated in the joint Paris and New York designer show held at the Palace of Versailles, where Andy Warhol also appeared in the audience. This history is described in detail in Robin Givhan’s The Battle of Versailles: The Night American Fashion Stumbled into the Spotlight and Made History (Flatiron Books, 2015).

In recent years, fashion discourse has often been filled with stories about the trajectories of great figures of the past. Learning from the past in order to think about the future is a standard approach, but it can also resemble a situation in which contemporary thinkers at an impasse appropriate great philosophers who are already dead for their own purposes.

I once saw the artist Shusaku Arakawa rage against contemporary philosophy, saying, “Today’s philosophy is all wrong. Throw it in the trash, and throw the trash can into the trash too!” People search for answers to the question of what should be done next, but new and thrilling things in the future are almost never predicted in books like these. Perhaps it is actually just right to be like Arakawa: burn the book, think while watching the flames, and work. After the end of the contemporary, the post-contemporary appears, and we rhyme with a new history. Considering how drastically the world changed in thirty years, there is no reason that the next new thing will not occur in this era. We must not hesitate to put something new into action because of the past.